'In 40 seconds, everything was gone': The Swiss village destroyed by climate change

Sometimes climate change is hard to visualise, but not the disaster that struck the Swiss alpine village of Blatten on May 28. In the middle of the afternoon a glacier that had stood above the village for centuries broke free from the mountainside and crashed down onto Blatten.

The Swiss authorities had seen in coming and evacuated the inhabitants 10 days earlier – only one person is missing, which is both miraculous and a tribute to Swiss engineering. But the 300 people who lived there lost everything.

Daniel Ritler had lived all his life in Blatten. The restaurant and delicatessen he ran with his wife Karin now lie under millions of tons of rock and mud, themselves invisible under millions of gallons of water.

“The whole thing happened within 40 seconds. In 40 seconds, everything was gone. Houses that were built in 15 and 16 centuries were buried, all buried”, he told me.

The sheep Daniel kept in the pristine alpine pastures above the village also survived, but whether they or the Ritlers will even be able to return is uncertain, perhaps even unlikely. First the geology of the Lotschental valley must stabilise, and that itself could take many years.

This disaster was not caused solely by climate change – erosion and minor earthquakes in these mountains also played their part – but there’s little doubt that without the significant warming the Alps have seen in the last few decades it wouldn’t have happened.

On current trends, glaciologists confidently predict that by the end of his century, 2100, there will be no more glaciers in Switzerland. This doesn’t just mean a lot of melt-water: the ice in a glacier binds together huge quantities of mud and scree and rock, so when the ice melts much more than water comes down a mountainside.

Professor Stuart Lane, a British glaciologist who lives in these mountains, and teaches at the University of Lausanne, says that as good as Swiss engineering may be, you cannot engineer away a problem as big as the one that hit Blatten.

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Indeed, difficult decisions may have to be taken about moving whole towns or villages out of the way of collapsing valley walls.

“The only way you can get a glacier back is by increasing snow in winter and reducing ice melt in summer”, he said. “So only with a reversion to the climate of 50-60 years ago will you see glaciers come back again”.

And you don’t have to be a top scientist to know how unlikely that is.

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